


Adrift, Unsung

by LotusRox



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Communication Failure, M/M, Pining, Pre-Slash, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 15:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13720590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LotusRox/pseuds/LotusRox
Summary: "It’s the middle of August, and the peach trees outside are starting to give the first bumps of green fruit. The view doesn’t bring any joy to Hal, too busy making arrangements, barely sleeping on the living room’s couch and quickly working from dusk to dawn to hide their tracks, to hide anything that could give away their position, to...To what end? What would become of Philanthropy now? Dave has pneumonia in the room right next to his little work space. The question rang hollow, selfish."------There's so much to rebuild after the Tanker. Dave's broken trust in Hal, for example.





	Adrift, Unsung

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mightyscrub](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mightyscrub/gifts).



> A whole lifetime ago, the amazing [Ren (Mightyscrub)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mightyscrub) posted a prompt for an exchange that went "Character A betrays Character B (or at least it seems that way) and they must rebuild their shattered trust."
> 
> And then, The Real Life (tm) and writer's block devoured me hard, and this sat unfinished in my Drive for literal ages, gathering dust and shame. It's complete now, and it comes with the entirety of my fingers crossed so y'all enjoy it.

The word that lingers between them i n the aftermath of the Tanker Incident isn’t quite awkwardness.

 

Hal had never felt as terrified as back then, steering a hotwired zodiac boat amidst hulking waves, and a current that had threatened to pull his fragile vessel directly into the whirlpools with the strength of two tons of metal sinking to the bottom of the river. Blinded by the rain. Frozen by the knowledge that it had been his words and his shoddy lead and his stupid hope what had put David inside that ship.

 

He isn’t sure how the hell they didn’t drown together. Or how he found the strength to jump into a water that to this day frightens him, mind flashing to images of bloated blue corpses, until he could grab David by the harness. Swimming back with him in tow to the feeble boat, still in its place by nothing short of a miracle and already weighed down by what felt like half the river, in dire need of bailing. Throwing David inside before climbing back in.

 

The roar of the shipwreck had been louder than the zodiac’s motor. But not as loud as Hal’s mounting frenzy, heart beating as fast as he breathed, as he led them back to the shore by the shortest path.

 

Fishing Olga out of the water had been almost an afterthought. Hal had put both of them side by side on the gravel by the riverside, and had pulled double duty on the CPR.  David had coughed, desperate, and then thrown up brine and bile. Olga’s first reaction had been to grab Hal by the neck as she choked and wheezed for air.

 

Something inside Hal, something teenaged and panic-struck beyond reason, had settled down just a little bit.

 

They remained unconscious, but adrenaline had his back still. Hal more dragged than carried both David and Olga to their shitty old jeep, first one and then the other, their weight almost crushing him and yet-- there was no time to lose.

 

Red lights had no meaning. He sped back to their closest safehouse, the one they thought they wouldn’t get to use because of how far down the Lower Bay it was.

 

Hal knew nothing of hypothermia. He didn’t want to rely on his common sense. Intuition had wronged him, the Internet had a far better idea on what to do. Cold wet clothes were out. He grabbed every blanket and piece of clothing they had available and covered both his patients. The rusty electric heater the apartment had come with ran all night. Somewhere undetermined in time and space, Hal passed out in exhaustion.

 

Olga wasn’t there anymore when he woke up.

 

David was mumbling and whimpering  i n his sleep - It was recurring, and yet this time the only thing Hal dared to do was to check his temperature with the thermometer in the first aid box he prepared for every safe house they set.

 

The device beeped to announce David didn’t have a fever, or at least not yet. The sound rang through the silent house, Hal felt it in his bones, unable to allow himself to feel little more than relief at this small mercy.

 

He felt empty.  He had almost killed the one person that mattered the most to him.  _ He had fucked up. _

 

There was no energy left in him and yet he could only take out his laptop, turn it on, and read the verdict.

 

When David finally woke up, he couldn’t look at Hal’s face.

 

A week later, not much has changed.

 

 

***

 

 

The cabin was old, moldy  and ill-prepared, but it had to make do. Hal, somehow without braining himself with the rusty axe outside, had cut enough wood to keep a merry fire going, as permanently as he could.

 

Days had passed by. And now--

 

Now they don’t talk. Not like before.

 

They exchange bare-bone pleasantries. David says “thank you” whenever Hal brings him bowls of instant soup or an extra blanket, which has to count for something. He isn’t sure he would have been able to tolerate complete silence.  He  _ knows _ he deserves complete silence and yet, he misses the easy camaraderie from before. Craves it. All those long talks, Dave’s quiet eloquence, that special way he had of making Hal feel on the verge of an abyss he  _ wanted _ to jump into - just because of his smile, crooked and reserved.

 

He aches for the friendly weight of David’s arm around his shoulders, making an ingrate of him as he quietly yearned for more.

 

As the news kept falling over them, no more a UN-NGO in the making but wanted terrorists now, Nastasha with her radio silence, Mei Ling apologizing for how little she was able to help now…  More than ever, it feels like the entire planet is against them.

 

This quiet is crushing the air out of the lungs of Hal, effective like an industrial vice. Guilt clouded his windpipe whenever he heard David cough. It wasn’t the first time he had sent someone so important to him to their death. Shouldn’t he be thankful David is still breathing? That he hadn’t lost yet another person dear to his heart?

 

It’s the middle of August, and the peach trees outside are starting to give the first bumps of green fruit. The view doesn’t bring any joy to Hal, too busy making arrangements, barely sleeping on the living room’s couch and quickly working from dusk to dawn to hide their tracks, to hide anything that could give away their position, to--

 

To what end? What would become of Philanthropy now?  Dave has pneumonia in the room right next to his little work space. The question rang hollow, selfish.

 

Something had to give.

 

As oftentimes happens with destiny, instead of being something useful, what gives is the old Land Rover that had brought them there. Without it, they are stranded with no means to get food.

 

The last can of soup finds its use in a silent, fateful breakfast. Their cabinets, now empty, salute Hal as he washes the dishes to quell his well-justified anxiety.

 

Raspy voice, weak limbs, and David rises and says, “I’ll hunt us some.”

 

And Hal, Hal of course protests, because clearly David is out of his mind if he thinks he’d allow him out of bed so soon, in his condition. But Dave repeats his statement, eyes dark and haunted, and words dry and die on Hal’s tongue.

 

He doesn’t take long to come back.

 

Three rabbits. Hal is squeamish, _Hal_ _loves animals_ , loves puppies and kitties and widdle little froggies, and even the cattle aliens were so fond of kidnapping. He helps anyway to skin them and clean them, a world of guilt and sorrow stuck right inside his windpipe, a Gordian Knot of everything that had gone wrong, wrong, wrong between them.

His hands were bloodstained already. Rabbit gore wouldn’t make them worse.

 

It would’ve been lovely to say that all comes crashing down - his pain and his remorse, and that he pleaded David for forgiveness. It would’ve been wonderful to say they hugged this away.

 

But David Sears, he has known betrayal so many times.

 

Hal only knows the fact - not the details. And even that much was enough for him to see how deeply, how incredibly he had corrupted everything between the two of them.  So he says instead, willing his voice to not shake, to not  _ beg _ \- “David… please. I miss you.”

 

More than anything, he wants to kneel at David’s naked feet instead, and hide his face in the cotton of David’s pajamas to better swallow the shame he has been feeling since New York.  He wants to breathe in the familiar scent of him and  _ speak,  _ finally confessing what he has needed this whole time-- need for his pardon, for his words, for the fleeting hugs and touches that had made Hal feel  _ brave, _ and  _ whole, and guilty  _ of the greed they unleashed inside him, his traitorous body stabbing him with  _ want. _

 

Hal stays where he is, standing straight and trembling. Waiting.

 

David looks at him and says nothing.

 

 

***

 

 

Hal does his best to make himself useful.

 

Beyond maintaining his duties as Philanthropy’s appointed hacker - and therefore the one who could cover their tracks, get them info, get them ill-gained money; he sweeps the house, keeps it free of dust, washes the windows. It’s a frenzy of activity not unlike a manic episode, the ones he had learnt to recognize late in his teens.  Ups and downs. Depression and anxiety and sudden outbursts of energy that demanded anything,  _ anything _ to occupy himself with.

 

He’s so exhausted of the silence. And David, David had lived in silence for god knows how many years. Hal knew of his capacity for it and it  _ terrified him. _

 

“David…”, he said one afternoon, on the verge of tears and with the dirty rag he had been cleaning the oven with clinging with grease to his hands. “David, please,  _ talk to me." _

 

They used to be best friends.  _ Still are. _

 

Isn’t it?

 

David, not bereft of his own demons, would later say he looked at Hal and had thought of a bottle of whiskey to ease himself into this conversation. A bottle, or several, or maybe just to drink and not talk because unearthing the literal Ghost Of Christmas Past was more than he could stand in that moment - old pains brought back while almost bedridden.

 

“Did I ever tell you”, he says instead, and he'd also talk then of the need for alcohol  _ singing  _ in his veins in ways he thought he had left behind, “of Operation N313?”

 

His gaze is dark with nostalgia and hurt.  Hal had learnt to recognize that look back in Alaska. But it had been the first time he had felt it, so very keenly, directed right towards him.

 

And Dave, demonstrating exactly how many negative fucks he gives about his lungs, goes to retrieve the lone box of cigarettes stashed neatly in the First Aid kit, and lights up for the first time in two weeks.

 

 

***

 

 

Hal understands now.

 

He had withheld basic information on his briefing.  He had distorted the truth to lead David into a mission that ended up distinctively different to what he had expected.

 

_ Just like them. _

 

How could he claim to have been David’s friend? How could he justify,  now and forever only to himself, the secret yearning he had felt towards him for years?

 

The horrors of Outer Heaven, awful in itself, had pushed Solid Snake into going back to David Sears - six years of isolation in Alaska, trying to glue back the pieces of himself with cheap alcohol and a stubborn will to stay alive despite the temptations of his own brain. 

 

Then he had gotten dragged into doing it all over again, the permission to go back to Alaska his sole recompense. Four years.

 

It happened yet again at Shadow Moses.

 

This is how Hal had found him in the aftermath - In a humble cabin at Twin Lakes, a gun in his hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.

 

Hal had offered him a  _ partnership. _

 

In the end, he had just exploited him as his very own dog of war.

 

_ Just. Like. Them. _

 

Words, Hal’s words this time, stay stuck inside his throat. 

 

David, bigger man than most, tells him he isn’t quitting Philanthropy. That his personal feelings wouldn’t get in the way of his mission. He’d have to trust Hal again, whether he likes it or not, if they are to continue working together - and this is what he has been trying to make his peace with in the previous weeks.

 

The only way out of this clusterfuck of a situation is clear, for Hal, sudden like an epiphany.

 

“You’ve been honest with me, and told me something important,  isn’t it? David..:” Hal pauses, fear grips him by the throat and then he pushes ahead anyway, “Then maybe… no, please, please let me be as honest as you.”

 

The name of E.E is burning a hole in Hal’s tongue, and he spits out: “I have a little sister.”

 

“ _ Have _ , I think, not  _ had _ . She-- We only lived together for a few years. She was adopted into the family when her mom married my father.” Another long pause, and it’s unfair, because he knows he’s wording it this way to avoid telling  _ the whole truth  _ of their estrangement, starting with the reasons _.  _ These were just snippets to excuse himself for the mess. “I haven’t seen her in years. I thought… the anonymous tip was actually from someone signing as E.E. That’s what I called her, and only she knew it.”

 

What does it mean to be “completely honest” in a situation like this?

 

Why does he feel so awful for not revealing something so personal?

 

“I thought the tip was E.E. Trying to help me and…” A shiver of grief passes through him, “Trying to start a conversation. She’d be 16 now, but she started learning about computers when she was really young.”

 

Nostalgia doesn’t allow Hal to swallow a, “I taught her her first computer language when she was six.”

 

They both go quiet after this. Hal knows he must get to the point where his explanation actually excuses having used David for personal reasons, but he finds there is no justification to add. Silence lasts an insurmountable amount of minutes. Outside, the sun has set, and the rural setting of the cabin allows the stars to start shining in the darkened sky of late August.

 

“I have to think”, David says then. He retreats to the room, taking the cigarettes with him. And Hal, who loathes his habit on the first place and specially loathes it when David smokes on the bed, finds himself unable to protest.

 

It’s not like they’re sharing a space, or anything at all anyway.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Days slip by like oil between his fingers.

 

The heat of the summer only means Hal pushing his feeble equipment harder, the fans of his computers running in a constant, pained buzz from dawn to dusk. Silence didn’t bother him anymore. It didn’t when he first ran away from home. By the time he had dropped out of college, it was practically his companion. Drawing from past experience was easy.

 

These days, the bloated blue lips of his father in the bottom of a swimming pool only appear before him when he stops working. So he downs coffee by the pot, and pills from the first aid kit by the handful, and blasts Jpop on his headphones… and keeps going.

 

Sometimes Dave appears by his side with a plate of  _ anything,  _ and forces him to eat with a few words of concern. And why shouldn’t he? He clearly stated his wish for Philanthropy to continue existing. Hal is a part of it.  It doesn’t mean anything beyond that.   
  


These days, the bloated blue lips of David among the violent waves only haunt him when he looks at him.

  
Sometimes, Hal passes out with the keyboard right under his face, and wakes up with his cheek crisscrossed with the pressure of it, the disappointment on himself knotted tight around his stomach. He siphons money from a thousand of illegal accounts around the globe by the coin, from people who won’t miss it. He makes arrangements for future vehicles and safehouses. He kills as many traces of their activities as he can.

 

He had done his best to quash down whatever the news are saying about the Tanker Incident at first, to no avail. Like bacteria, they just mirrored each other and multiplied no matter his efforts. He feeds them misinformation instead now, planting false leads, fake news in news sites; creating conspiracies out of thin air, watching them spread and take root. The less people were looking for them…

 

Hal  _ works,  _ and he doesn’t stop when the first laptop gives out on him. He has several spares. He can do this.

 

A week after their conversation, David hears a loud crash coming from the living room, and finds Hal unconscious on the floor.

 

Outside, the heat is making the vision of the trees shiver in blurry waves, persistent like the buzz of Hal’s computer fan piercing through the living room, and through David’s nerves. 

 

Later, David would admit to him he had actually panicked when he first tried to wake him up and Hal wouldn’t open his eyes. That he hadn’t really seen him pushing himself past his limits, thinking it was just another bout of Hal’s well-known workaholism, that he hadn’t dared to interrupt knowing how dire their situation was. That he had thought Hal was doing this because he could take it.

 

Biting his lip until it bleeds, he takes Hal in his arms and carries him to the bedroom.

 

When Hal comes back to his senses, it’s so dark it can only be the dead of the night and he’s laying in the softest surface his back has touched since New York. Sluggish, he opens his eyes as if his eyelids weighed bricks, his mouth stuffed with cotton and his mind equally spent.

 

His heart starts beating an unfairly, untimely wild tune when he realizes David is sleeping by his side. And he realizes, the spiky, tight, ugly feeling lodging suddenly beneath his throat--

 

He couldn’t remember the last time he had dared to feel  _ optimistic _ .

 

 

* * *

 

 

They plot the route to get out of the Appalachians and back into the world together.

 

Mexico would have afforded them better freedom, but by car only, reaching it would’ve taken them unthinkable amounts of time. In the end, they pick Canada - big enough to get lost in, Hal still had contacts there willing to trade data for data, money for forged papers.

 

Everything that couldn’t be carried on hitchhiker backpacks is stashed in the cabin’s concrete tomb of a basement, to await their return with frankly feeble hopes. It isn’t that different from what they had done at David’s home in Twin Lakes and the familiarity of it, cycles that repeated, strikes Hal with a pang of something that’s too sarcastic to be just longing.

 

They make it to Philly, and buy yet another used car. Returning to New York to cross the border there gets unanimously voted as risky, and neither mention the lingering feeling of Cursed that place had left in both their mouths, thick and bitter and over all _chilling._ Nothing Ever Happened at Ohio. They’d be moving west.

 

Detroit’s tired hellscape would’ve been the next stage. It didn’t have to come to that: Mei Ling contacts them, briefly and through extreme encryption, with an offer to coordinate a ferry for them as the last favor she might be able to pull for Philanthropy in a very, very long time.

 

In between the zigzagging routes and the trip lengthened by their avoidance of highways, the motel rooms and house-squatting, Hal realizes they’re breathing again.

 

There’s a slow sweetness to their reunion. David would touch his shoulder, sometimes. Hal dares to tease him. Nobody says anything the night they start sleeping on the same bed again instead of taking turns. Or the first morning they wake up entangled, all platonic intimacy the way they had managed to build through two years of trust before the Hudson had swallowed it down.

 

The radio of their shitty Nissan picks up only the AM signal amidst this sea of corn they’re going through. Hal bemoans only in jest the much-noted absence of L’Arc-En-Ciel to lighten up the hardships of the road and Dave replies with a gentle barb about the wonders of what everyone insists to mock as  _ ‘Dad Music’.  _ Turns up the volume with a grin when a gentle  _ shamisen  _ follows the droning of an old man’s rambles on The 80’s.

 

“You’re in luck”, he huffs. And the singer’s voice, female and soft, does follow in English, but the pentatonic scale of it doesn’t lie.

 

Hal can only stare in shock when David starts singing along to it in Japanese. Gruff, off key. Sure of what he’s doing with the lyrics.

  
_ “Ue o Muite Arukou”, _ he explains, and there’s something softened to him when the song ends, replaced immediately by an ad about cattle feed. “Someone I used to know liked the thing. The cover’s called  _ ‘Sukiyaki’ -  _ They turned into a love song in the 80’s, but it’s way older.”

 

“Sukiyaki is a beef stew”, Hal manages, stunned.

 

He’s struck by the certainty they’d be alright. He’s struck by the certainty he’s in love with David Sears. 

 

These two things are at odds with each other.

 

He’s pulled out of his reverie when Dave huffs one of those weird laughs of his and ruffles his hair of all things, goes back to focusing on the road.

 

“I’d kill for some beef stew.”

 

And Hal, amidst the wave of flustering overtaking his face, dares and pats his thigh.

 

“Take us out of here”, he replies with a mirror grin, and the odd feeling in his chest is a skein made of bravery and yearning and just this dash of  _ hope.  _ “And I swear I’m buying.”

 

_ ‘Remembering those happy summer days’,  _ he had managed to make out from the verses Dave had sung.  _ ‘But tonight I’m all alone.’  _ It’s like he’s been pulled out of something heavy and viscous. Lonely lyrics, for once, don’t drown him. 

 

He has no clue at all where to find a Japanese place where they’re going. He’s never actually been to Canada.

 

He’s still sure they can make it there together.

**Author's Note:**

> BTW - You guys should really go take a look at what's happening at the [Metal Gear Solid Winter Games 2018](https://mgswintergames.tumblr.com/) ;3
> 
> PS: "Ue o Muite Arukō" is an anti-war Japanese song from 1961 purposefully written to look like it's a song about a lost love. I'm 100% sure Master Miller not only knew it but also had Feelings about it.


End file.
